Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

It was a four-bedroom apartment. One bedroom had an IKEA bed, a scattering of men’s and women’s clothes on the furniture and the floor. Fagin was a bit of a slob. The second bedroom had six computers in it, all along a table, a bean bag chair, a TV with an elaborate game station attached. Fagin – still up to his old tricks.

Two young Oliver Twists – maybe sixteen or so – sat at the computers, plugged into their iPods. In their envelope of music they hadn’t noticed me. So I went back to the kitchen, got an apple from Fagin’s fridge, and washed it. I took a knife from a drawer because I didn’t know these sixteen-year-olds and I went back to the computer room.

I bit into my apple and came up behind the first Oliver Twist. He was a thin kid, brown, curly hair, a scattering of pimples on his cheeks. He was intent on what he was doing on the computer screen, fingers hammering on the keyboard.

I glanced at the screen over his shoulder. Computer code, but with comments written in Russian. I scanned them. Interesting mischief the Oliver Twists were conjuring.

I popped out an earplug and said, ‘Hi, whatcha doing?’

He jumped out of his chair. His eyes widened at the knife in my hand.

‘Uh… uh.’

The other kid – African American, a bit older, wearing a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, jeans and the ugliest yellow sneakers I’d ever seen – bolted out of his chair. I showed him the knife and he stopped.

‘What. Are. You. Doing?’ I asked again.

Neither answered. ‘Hacking into China or Russia today, boys?’ I pretended like I hadn’t read over their shoulders and took another bite of the apple. ‘Or perhaps another country? Fagin loves putting the screws on Egypt and Pakistan.’

Again, neither answered. They glanced at each other.

‘Silence bores me,’ I said. ‘It makes me want to play knife games.’ Aren’t I nice, threatening teenagers?

‘Russia,’ the Saints fan said after a moment. ‘We’re laying data bombs into their power grid.’

‘Sounds very patriotic,’ I said. ‘Is Fagin due here soon?’

The Saints fan nodded. ‘Yes. He went to go get snacks.’

‘You poor, deprived things didn’t run out of Red Bull, did you?’

‘Um, actually, we ran out of Pepsi,’ the thin kid said.

‘Well, far be it from me to interfere,’ I said. ‘Fagin’s an old friend. I’m just going to wait for him.’

Slowly they sat back down and put their hands on their computer keyboards and resumed their work, typing at a much slower level. But neither slipped their earbuds back into place.

I ate my apple and watched them and waited.

Fagin showed up ten minutes later, opening his door, holding a paper bag of groceries. He dropped the bag when he saw me. An orange tumbled from the depths and rolled to my foot.

‘What the hell. Sam Capra.’

‘Hi, Fagin.’

His mouth shut tight. I picked up the orange and tossed it to him. He caught it.

‘Are you going to run or shut the door?’ I asked.

He shut the door. He set the small bag of groceries down on the counter. He went to the door and made sure the two Oliver Twists were fine.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t hurt your kids.’

‘He stole an apple,’ said the Saints fan.

‘Really? Did he interfere with your work?’

‘No,’ they both said.

‘Back to it.’

Almost as one, the Oliver Twists put their earbuds back in place. Fagin set a can of cold soda by each of them. The typing speed on the keyboards increased.

Fagin crossed his arms and said, ‘Whatever you want, the answer is no.’

‘That’s a harsh hello,’ I said.

I had met Fagin back in my days working on the CIA’s task force on global crime aka Special Projects aka The Dirty Down Jobs We Gotta Do But No One Is Supposed To Know. Our purview covered everything from human trafficking to arms dealing to corporate espionage, in the aspect of when it threatened national security. Crime at this level, hand in hand with terrorism, is a threat to the stability of the West. It reaches inside and poisons government, it undermines the basic social contract down to the bone of civilization. Twenty per cent of the economy is now illicit. The criminals are becoming more mainstream.

But in stopping this crime we sometimes committed crimes ourselves. Fagin was an example. Remember reading in the news, when Russia and its much smaller neighbor, Georgia, got into that brief war a while back? The Russians launched not only bullets and missiles at Georgia, they took down all of Georgia’s internet access. With a massive cyber attack against critical servers, the Russians managed to cut off an entire nation of four million people from the internet. If you were inside Georgia, and you tried to access CNN or the BBC web pages, you got served Russian propaganda. If you tried to withdraw money from Georgian banks, your funds stayed put. If you tried to email people in other parts of the country, you sat and stared at your unsent message still warming your mailbox. The cyber attack, the Russians claimed, was not done by government hackers, but rather by patriotic, good-hearted, milk-drinking Russians acting independently who wanted to help fight the enemy. After the war, NATO and the highly irritated Georgians determined that some of the hackers who launched the internet attack were tied to some of the most notorious criminal rings inside Russia. If this vigilante hacker corps wasn’t an official part of the government, they were at least protected by the government, and their presence gave the Russian leadership necessary and plausible deniability.

The best hackers are not always on government payrolls. Sometimes you need your hackers to not be connected to you, when you spend days breaking laws and flouting treaties.

Fagin was our back pocket, our deniable warrior. He and his digital Oliver Twists. When we needed things broken or stolen and there was no way it could be tied to the CIA, ever, then Special Projects and Fagin stepped in to pick the pocket and scurry away.

‘You don’t work for Special Projects any more, Sam,’ he said. ‘Get out.’

‘I’m a freelance consultant, like you. Not exactly on the formal benefits package.’

‘Really? Really? ’ Fagin’s favorite word, delivered with a sneer. I had once counted how many times Fagin uttered Really? in a meeting and stopped at fifty.

‘I am here to ask you for a favor.’

‘Really? I repeat. Get out.’

‘I’m pressed for time. Tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell the North Koreans about you and your crew. And the Russians. And the Chinese. And the Iranians.’ Fagin and his cadre of hackers spied on and created hassles for a variety of enemies. Maybe even some friends. Let me just say the French, the Brazilians, and the Japanese also all have reason to hate Fagin. They just don’t know it.

‘You really wouldn’t dare.’

‘My child’s life is really at stake, Fagin, so, yeah, I would. Sit down. We’re going to talk.’

He sat. He still looked like the computer teacher he’d once been, in a New York high school. On the back wall was a Teacher of the Year award he’d gotten years before, back when he still taught, smelling of chalk, dry-erase pens and fusty computer labs. Of course. Fagin had been so talented at encouraging young talent and honing minds. Unfortunately he encouraged them to hack into banks and government databases, usually as a prank. Special Projects had recruited him when he and his keyboarding artful dodgers tried to delve (unwittingly) into a front company for the CIA, kept him and his iPodded foundlings from a prison sentence and guided him toward more constructive pursuits. To the outside world he worked as a software design consultant.

‘Your child’s life? Aren’t you being really melodramatic?’